These past few days I organized and hosted a weekend long game jam, namely Gotland Game Jam HT 14. While not helping participants out with their games or generally making sure things went smoothly, I made a game by myself.

I took this opportunity to try out the new UI system in Unity 4.6, turns out it was pretty nice overall. There’s a lot of similarities with NGUI in how things are set up, but they differ greatly in implementation. The new UI feels infinitely more solid than NGUI, mostly because they’ve been able to do stuff not possible with only scripts. One of these things is the RectTransform – A new type of transform specifically for UI and 2d.

It’s not all good though, the Text component is currently horrendously bad, offering very few options. As I’ve heard though from meeting some Unity folks in Paris they’re working on replacing it with a new properly updated one soon enough.

Back to the game, here’s a bit of gameplay recorded on device:

It’s really quite simple, wherever you touch on the side panels, the green ball will move towards it. You need to avoid the red shapes and pickup the blue ones to get health.

I’m really happy on how it turned out, especially the art style. I was initially planning on having a lot more colors, effects, particles etc but I soon realized my programmer art really could benefit from keeping it simple and clean – so I did.

Even though it’s quite far from a finished game, it’s a really nice idea and foundation to build upon. Don’t know when I’ll have the time to do it, but these are some of the things that I’ll add in the future: